Have you ever thought about how far we’ve come in terms of data storage? Today we have a great infographic for you about just that topic.
Before we get into the infographic, we found some really insightful information about today’s need for an optimized date storage from our partners at NimbleStorage.
The Need to Optimize Data Storage
IT environments large and small are being reshaped by an increasingly virtualized, dynamic application environment and ever-growing data sets and performance require ments. As a result, storage systems—and IT resources—are being strained to deliver higher capacity and performance, protect more data and reduce operational overhead.
Virtualization and today’s business applications place unique demands on network stor- age. As enterprises virtualize more applications and implement virtual desktop infra- structure (VDI), these demands must be balanced with the diverse I/O and data protection needs of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and other business-critical applications….
Flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) help address some of these challenges. They have excellent read and random I/O performance and low latency, which are crucial for business applications, server virtualization, and VDI. However, due to high cost and write endurance issues, using flash-only arrays is only practical for a very limited set of applications. Consequently, data storage vendors have been promoting various hybrid combinations involving flash and hard drives. Some vendors have taken a bolt-on approach, which simply layers flash on top of disk as an additional tier. This approach fails to leverage flash in a cost-effective way; and does not maximize disk utilization.
It does little to simplify IT administrators’ jobs as they now have to contend with management and data migration between multiple tiers of storage.
What IT organizations of all sizes need is an efficient flash-optimized network storage solution. Specifically, IT should be looking for storage that marries the best character- istics of flash and hard disk drives to accelerate performance, maximize data capacity, protect data and applications, simplify management, and let IT easily and affordably scale performance and capacity as their business needs change.
Nimble Storage has architected such a solution from the ground up, combining flash technology, high-capacity disks, and high performance computing to deliver the indus- try’s most efficient and affordable storage systems. Nimble Storage’s flash-optimized hybrid arrays cost effectively accelerate applications, protect data, and empower IT to take on new initiatives while meeting ever-changing business needs.